August 17, 2005

Virus writers have created a worm that spreads using a Microsoft Plug-and-Play vulnerability disclosed only last week. The ZoTob worm exploits a security weakness detailed just five days prior to its arrival last weekend.

I can’t get too excited about an incident like this as a general rule, other than it is one more spot on the public’s perception of the whole personal computing experience and Microsoft products in particular. However, the quick reaction time of the malware writers in this case is alarming since many large IT organizations take a significant amount of time to qualify OS patches before rolling them out. It’s easy to say “why don’t they just roll out the patch when it is available,” but they also have to answer to the brass when a patch breaks a business critical application.